


The End of Memory

by orphan_account



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:51:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Manager of the Royal Bethlehem...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to Ambition: Heart's Desire! 18, and for the Hallowmas 1891 Destinies

* * *

_"I see his face, every day in the streets"_

* * *

After it happens, you send the wretches who once were soldiers in droves down the cramped streets of the night market that has sprung up in the heart of your ruined city, but the Masters of the Bazaar move like candle-cast shadows on stone walls.

The Bazaar knows nothing of mercy. Your soul? Your life? The light of surface-memories in your eyes? The only thing of worth you had was your City. The Bazaar has no use for you now.

You gather up the glass and return unknown, unseen, among the denizens of the Neath. You learn to live like this. You learn secrets and secret ways. Scrounge together enough of the parchment-maps that you think you could find your way across the Unterzee to the land they now call Polythreme.

But you do not visit — you do not think you could bear it.

In your dreams the streets of Polythreme are silent and quivering. You breathe in. Your frock coat pulls tight about your shoulders, though there is no breeze. Your traveling-cases rest on stones that scream.

Into the heart of the city. Before you, the blackglass Castle and the diamond-ridged throne. The streets are rife with the dust that dulls the pain and dulls the senses. Clay tightens in your throat. A mockery. You wake. You breathe in.

* * *

"Anything," you say, and join the Marvellous.

A clatter of cards. Four of Swords. King of Coins. Three of Cups. Tristram, two places down, smiles a mouthful of rotting teeth. Heads you lose, tails I win.

"Listen, listen," the Jester sings, and sounds his horn. Across distance of worlds and years between, you can hear the screaming in the streets of Polythreme.

For days afterward the alleys of the Bazaar are overrun by hordes of Unfinished Men. You receive an unusual visitor. "Never again," the Clay Man says, in _his_ voice.

Never again.

* * *

The Masters still send you nightmares, cold corpses of appalling secrets that chill your rooms in the dead of night. Fire-lit windows and writings on the wall. Before, you would wake, and the sun would chase the fear away. Here in the Neath, the false stars do nothing for ravings of weeping scars and stained souls.

Your rest is not dreamless deep. Far from it. But nothing, nothing, compares to this—

You sleep. You wake, and the stones of Polythreme still weep.

* * *

The Masters give you the keys to the Royal Bethlehem.

Nightmares are not to be feared, you think. If the Hotel is a sanctuary from anything, it is the Bazaar, which is much more cruel than any dream. So you set out to make the Hotel as comfortable as possible. You walk the paths of their terror — more familiar to you now than the crumbling statues of the Bazaar — and soothe the troubled waters of their sleep.

Your lodgers rave of stone fires bleeding chairs. "Eternal night is a blank void," one young man says in earnest. "I could not bear a stained soul for so long a time."

Psh. You have lived forever. There is no use in truth and no truth in goodness, just as there is nothing to be gained from the Bazaar. But they are only young, and the young have the hubris to believe they will never die. Who are you to tell them otherwise?

Everywhere his face etched in sand and clay. On the wind-whispers of your lodgers' dreams, across the Zee, ride the spider-songs of the land called Polythreme.

_Are you there?  
Are you there?_

* * *

What do you grieve?

Not your Fallen City. Oh, she was beautiful but all beauty must fail, and better to go down in a blaze of glory than to wither away to ashes and history.

Not the King. The world will end before you forget, but regret changes nothing. what is done is done. You pay your penance in tormented memory and live the consequence as best you can.

Not that he no longer loves you. You cannot, will not, begrudge him this.

It is that, in spite of all, you love him still.

* * *

The young lady has stood in her doorway for hours, twisting a chain of thorns through bleeding fingers. The other end is wound around a single white crow that lies twitching at her feet. An empty birdcage on the windowsill. Over its heart, where the thorns stab deep, red blossoms like a smile.

_If it comes back, it's yours forever_

Oh, she is too perspicacious for the carpeted halls of this old sanctuary. You tell her so, just before she leaves for the Neath to pursue the secrets of the Correspondence. You decide to keep her room empty; she will be back before long, no doubt.

* * *

The sorrow-spiders that bring you wind of Polythreme are quiescent that night. The Hotel is silent. So you sleep, for the first time in centuries, and dream of sun and sky and cedar trees.

"There will come a day," he says in a Clay Man's voice, "when everything you know is no longer as it was. Time has taken the treasures of life from you, and one day death will take you from them. The Bazaar is not kind. The Temple of Eyes is overrun with moths and mice. Your City is dead to you. So am I. But something will persist. Do you know what it is?"

His eyes are afire like the very Candle of Life. Instead of an answer you lift your fingers to touch his face, and his lips are sweet and warm with wine.

* * *

Polythreme remembers like glass through veins. Polythreme remembers like Wooden splinters lodged beneath a fingernail, or some small blood vessel of the extremities.

A grain of diamond dust in the hands of a wretched Clay thief, exchanged in the storm-drains of Spite for a memory of distant shores. Polythreme knows, and Polythreme remembers.

* * *

What persists?

When the last echo has drummed into silence and the last candle extinguished, when the false-stars have set over the ruins of the Fifth City for the last time, what will you save?

What will you save at the Liberation of Night?

What?

* * *

He knows. He knows. It shudders through you like a diamond-edged knife. The Clay Man of his likeness, so poorly made, lies in pieces at your feet. The stones are screaming. But this is London, not that city across the Zee.

_"Do not let him win. I couldn't bear it."_

Two thousand years of history squared away behind shuttering diamond eyes. Years hence, worlds away, the lights of Polythreme shudder and weep.

Once, before the Fall... but it has been a long, long time since then. Now you are the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel and he is the King with a Hundred Hearts, nothing more. The Bazaar runs rife with Clay Men who wear his face and even now the scent of cedarwood still makes you turn your head.

What of love is left, when there is nothing left to love?

Or did you simply dream it?

A clatter of cards. Seven of Clubs. Queen of Spades.

_What is your heart's desire?_

* * *

  _"... I am his ..."_

* * *

 


End file.
